Last month, the Community Energy People project partners came together for a day of workshops in London. Together, we are making new opportunities for people to get involved in community energy by creating jobs and new volunteering opportunities across England. The project is also supporting our partners to develop and grow with many of them becoming employers for the first time.
So far, we have created 30 paid part time roles and 52 volunteering opportunities meaning we’re well on our way to meeting our overall targets. These new community energy people have been involved in a wide range of projects and have already helped our groups to professionalise and deliver community energy projects faster. These include a range of energy advice programmes, and two community share offers for rooftop solar projects in Lancashire and Hampshire respectively.
The workshop day was an opportunity for many of us to get together in person for the first time (yes, I am much taller than you expect from Teams). Six new groups (Deben Climate Centre, Derbyshire Dales Community Energy, Grand Union Community Energy, Green Fox Community Energy, Our Power, and River Ivel Community Energy) joined our existing partners (Common Green, Energise South Downs, MaidEnergy, Rossendale Valley Energy, and Zero Carbon Guildford) in June so it was great to see everyone networking and getting to know each other.
We started the day with a morning of presentations by each group. This was an opportunity for us all to hear exciting updates about what each of us is working on and how the new people power from the project has supported us to do more for our communities.
We then moved to a workshop about improving monitoring and evaluation and measuring social impact. This allowed us at CEPathways to learn more what really mattered to our partners, and what they feel that current measures don’t include. This has already helped to informed research directions at CEPathways, about how we can capture the social value of community energy.
After lunch, we moved into a workshop where we collaborated on solutions to challenges that we were facing using an action learning approach – something that was new to many of us. During the session it was great to see people from different groups come together to come up with ways to overcome often shared issues. The session was a big success, and we plan on setting up a project action learning set to meet monthly and develop together.
Next, we ran a session designed to help groups explore ways of supporting potential volunteers to allow everyone to benefit. During the activity, participants had to explore what opportunities they might be able to create for a range of volunteer “personas”.
Finally, we turned to the future to co-create a training plan for the next 6 months of the project, and to begin planning for the end of the project in 18 months’ time to ensure that we’re able to continue our great progress.
We had lots of breaks and opportunities to network (although it seems there’s never enough time for this) and we started each workshop with a game or activity to get the creativity flowing. This meant that the energy of the day stayed positive and collaborative – I also loved seeing people’s drawing skills.
The day was a great opportunity for me to reflect on the project and I’m looking forward to creating more opportunities for groups to collaborate in the future. More than anything, it was energising to have everyone together and I can’t wait to help the Community Energy People achieve big things.
Written by Ben White